Soup with no gloop

The queen loved soup. She loved soup more than anything in the world except for the Princess Pea and the king. And because the queen loved it, soup was served in the castle for every banquet, every lunch and every dinner.
And what soup it was! Cook’s love and admiration for the queen and her palate moved the broth that she concocted from the level of mere food to a high art. (The Tale of Despereaux p.110)

Let's be clear about something. Elaine loves soup. She loves to cook it, to eat it and to share it with friends. Most of all she loves to feed it to her husband. Since we got married, teeth have been strictly optional for me. Decent gums and a long-handled spoon and I'm good to go.

So when we moved back to Edinburgh 2008 we were both looking forwards to rediscovering the great cafés, watering holes and hang-outs we loved 20 years ago. Most of all, Elaine was looking forwards to soup. Sure enough Edinburgh has great food in abundance. Except for the soup. Go to most cafes and you'll get a soup. Sometimes it'll be great (and we've had some seriously good soups) but usually it'll be cheap, probably served in a styrofoam cup and there'll be a nagging suspicion that it consists of left-overs. As Ottolenghi wrote recently,

Many cooks, including some serious chefs, treat the soup pot as a kind of culinary compost heap into which they chuck whatever happens to be lying around in the hope that it will miraculously be transformed.

Above all else, the magic ingredient that seems to be in 90% of the soups we've met in Edinburgh is gloop.

A sort of squishy, slightly gritty thickening agent made to bulk it out. It makes the kind of tomato soup that, when you look at it, it looks back at you. In a fight, you don't really know which one of you would win.

So we decided that we would make soup. Soup with no gloop. We would treat it as a food to be savoured. After all, soup is not just for a day, it's for life. This means that there would be no artificial thickeners, preservatives, colours or enhancers. No mass-produced concentrates, no cutting the dodgy bits off an old onion and hoping no one notices. No longer would soup be the cheap option on the menu, it would be the star. Our soups will never be padded out with corn starch, flour or suspicious purées. They will be made with vegetables, stock, herbs and spices and cuts of meat. And, of course, love.

Cook smiled “See? She said. “There ain’t a body, be it mouse or man, that ain’t made better by a little soup”  (The Tale of Despereaux p.233)

Full Circle

Full circle is the name we've given to our recycling and loyalty scheme. We've been working hard to make sure the soups we make use ingredients from sustainable and local sources but without paying attention to the packaging we risk becoming part of the problem. 

Part of the answer is the source of the packaging. All our materials come from Vegware; everything you'll get our soup in will compost within 12 weeks. Bowls, lids, carrier bags, even the spoons, they all taste good to the critters in the compost heap.

Thing is, although the packaging is designed to compost, if it ends up in landfill then it won't. Landfill conditions prevent composting. This means we have to take care of the other end too. If you are taking one of our soups home then we hope this shows that a) you have great taste and b) you will stick the packaging in your recycling. If you have a composter then it'll munch the containers quite happily. It's actually rather fun to watch...

Not everyone can do that so we've come up with a cunning plan to persuade you to bring the packaging back to us: free coffee. 

OK, not completely free but what we will do is to give you a stamp on your Regular Genius card. Ten stamps and the next coffee's on us. It rewards you for taking the time to bring the waste back rather than sticking it in the bin. It's not the world's most generous loyalty scheme, we're only just starting after all, but we think it's ingenious. 

There are other ways to get stamps. Bring in your own containers (bowls, cups whatever) and we'll give you a stamp there and then. We will be selling keep cups: fully reusable coffee cups. When you buy one you get a free coffee there and then and each time you use it you'll get a regular genius stamp. 

We'll tweak the scheme as it goes along but the basic idea is to close the circle. Hence the name. "Full circle" also refers to how we ended up here, but that's a story for another day.

Reportage

Very excitingly, I woke up this morning to find in my inbox that we have been recommended by Edinburgh Reporter as one of the five things to know today.Admittedly we came right after reports of a "fowl" smell but nothing's perfect.

Other than that, today has been probably the last day off before the last push starts. The window seat ought to be being made right now which means that Elaine can get busy with the sewing machine and we're testing out some more savoury mufflets on guinea pigs friends tonight. The soup kettles have arrived and Elaine will be off to the suppliers for a bunch of exotic spices.

This time next week the shop fit will be complete (all bar the snagging) and big red will have arrived from Italy ready to brew the first of, hopefully, many fine coffees. After many months of hunting down sites, planning and re-planning menus, trialling recipes and a fair amount of medicinal whisky, Union of Genius is now only days away.

The perfect package

Who would have thought that packaging could be so exciting? Not me but now we have bowls, labels and printed cups. 25 boxes worth, all from our friends at Vegware.

Part of the ethos of Union of Genius is something we call "full circle." We don't want our soup packaging ending up in landfill. For that reason our loyalty scheme is going to be based on bringing the packaging back but to complete the circle we need packaging that is produced sustainably and can be easily composted. That's where vegware comes in.

Even the labels can be composted.

So right now we have 11,000 printed cups and lids with bowls, cutlery, brown paper bags and napkins on the way. And nerves. Plenty of nerves...

Announcing the Union favicon

Here it is. My fab friend Pauline has been busy designing and assembling the Union website. It's odd - because the whole look and feel of Union has been crystallising slowly in my head for a few months now, I'm utterly familiar with what I want and how I want things to look. Pauline, though, builds websites - "out of concepts and thin air", as she memorably put it, which meant she had to create a webspace which looked like the thing that was only in my head. And get it right. She's done a spectacular job, too. She's captured the clarity and space I like on a website.

It's a work-in-progress at the moment - not Pauline's work-in-progress, though - I want to get pictures of the shop on the site, but if I posted images of the scummy slum which the shop is at the moment, all prospective customers would scarper. Right now, the shop is the perfect 'before' picture. All it lacks is an 'after' - but that's on it's way. The shopfit is imminent, and then Union will emerge green, sleek and gorgeous from the filth and grime. More on the shopfit will follow (a lot more...)

And in other news, I went to a vegware party recently, and met a lovely lady who has just moved to Edinburgh from a few years in Hungary. We got talking soups, surprisingly enough, and today she sent me a recipe for guylas, as cooked by the Hungarians. I made it today, as cooked by a Scottish soupmonger:



and that's going straight onto the Union playlist. Although it leaves me with a bit of a dumpling issue. Leave dumplings in the soup too long, and they go soggy. Leave them out for too long, and they go soggy and stodgy. Extensive dumpling research will have to be carried out, until a solution is found. Oh, the slings and arrows...

A serendipitous colour-matchy day, with Opecat

I have been sending off for a ridiculous quantity of fabric samples - I am creating a proper window-seat for folk to sit on, curl up on, look out at the world through big windows from and browse the webs from. But not, sad to say, enjoy the company of cats from - I suspect Environmental Health would have a view on that which differs from the cat cafes of Japan. Anyway, anyone who knows me knows that I do colour-matching. So, having settled on my fabrics - making my own window-seat upholstery, of course - I needed a patterned set of cushions or fabrics to back it up with. So, behind Opus cat, on the floor, there's my set of fabric samples I've settled on.

And today I found the perfect mix of patterned cushions and plain chenille ones. In British Home Stores. Did someone re-engineer that store while I wasn't looking? Because they are ACE. Great fabrics, beautiful colours and amazing prices. Honestly, I'm not on a retainer. But I'll be shopping there again. Isn't it fabulous when a plan comes together? And do I need to mention how brilliantly they match my fabric samples? Maybe not. Maybe I do, considering how well they are hidden behind the moglet's feet. But I do have to say how fabulous their staff were in chasing down a damson-coloured cushion which the Princes Street branch didn't have, but the Cameron Toll branch did. Thanks, ladies, you were the epitome of great customer service.

I am having too much fun. Shhh.

On how the life lived has overtaken the life penned - or, why this blog has effortlessly time-travelled five months.

A shorter and more accurate post title would be 'oh, bugger'.

This was going to be the written account of setting up Scotland's first soup cafe - something which either would, or wouldn't, happen, depending on the vagaries of fate, life and cashflow. After walking away from the opportunity of a lifetime to create a shop from an empty shell in a disused basement in an unloved corner of Edinburgh, I went into a slow but noticeable decline, which ended up with me applying for jobs as I was sure, very sure, that I simply wasn't going to find my perfect-sized property in my perfect location at a rent I could afford to pay.

And then suddenly I did.

Until the lease is signed, the location is a secret, but the lease will be signed in the next few days. The rent is under my budget. The property enjoys a rateable value lower than the business rates limit. It's the right size. There's a big kitchen in there already. It has big windows, and a really good feel about it. The landlord is lovely, supportive, businesslike and fair. And all of this is going to be turned into Union.

The last few months have been a round of websites (discovering your oldest pal is now a website designer is very useful), catering suppliers (the house is now full of not-perfect bowls and cutlery I didn't like after all), cake suppliers, print suppliers, composting companies, enormously expensive coffee machine companies and art companies and now, after a ten year gap, I am painting blackboards again, but this time for my own shop. The till arrived today, and if anything can make this whole enterprise seem terrifyingly real, it's the arrival of a brand-new till, complete with it's own thousand-page manual. Unbounded joy. Actually, it will be, once I learn how to work it.

I am having a lot of fun and a lot of fear, but the fun is most definitely winning. I will post a pic of the blackboard once I remember where I put it. The picture. It's quite hard to lose an A1 blackboard.